Attitudes towards homosexuals can change

ResearchBlogging.org is a great site for the latest research in the natural sciences. Here bloggers apply to register, and then when they blog about peer-reviewed academic research on their own blogs, they import and get a link with a blurb on the site.

It's about how a group of people imagining how it would be to live in a society where sex is not permitted, and how that affects the participants attitudes towards people who are homosexual. It turns out that

"[people who was in this experiment] were more able to take the perspective of homosexuals, than were the control participants [who attended a lecture on homophobia] , and this in turn was associated with more empathy towards people who are homosexual, a greater tendency to think of homosexuals and heterosexuals as all belonging to the same category (being human) and ultimately to more positive attitudes towards people who are homosexual."

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.